Richard L. Copley took this photograph in 1968 at the Memphis sanitation workers' strike -- the reason Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis on the day he was killed.
Scattered across the cinderblocks of our middle school walls are some new faces, photographs of kids who have been silenced. Lee Simpson on Oct. 10, 2008. Scotty Weaver on July 22, 2004. Lawrence King on Feb. 12, 2008. Carl Walker-Hoover on April 9, 2009. All silent. They are dead.
T. Elijah Hawkes has been a public school principal for 13 years. He is currently principal at Randolph Union, in Randolph, Vermont. He was founding principal of the James Baldwin School in New York City. His writings about adolescence, public school and democracy have appeared in the Huffington Post, Education Week, Kappan, Schools: Studies in Education, and in two books published by Rethinking Schools: The New Teacher Book and Rethinking Sexism, Gender and Sexuality. You can follow him on Twitter @ElijahHawkes.
Dr. June Cara Christian brings more than15 years of education experience to her role as a teaching and learning specialist for Teaching Tolerance. She has taught secondary, undergraduate and graduate students, and is an expert in critical pedagogies. Christian holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in English literature (from Washington University and Tennessee State, respectively), an M.Ed. with an emphasis in American culture from Washington University, and a Ph.D. in education leadership and policy from University of Missouri—St. Louis. Christian has trained educators across the United States and in
“All these kids … you must be brave,” said the man in hiking gear. After a sunny but cold day on the beach punctuated by a trudge through sandpaper wind, I was plodding downhill with the stragglers from my hiking group. The more energetic among them galloped to the end, past the curious hiker.
Cathery Yeh (she/her) is an assistant professor in the Attallah College of Educational Studies at Chapman University. She has been in education for over 20 years, beginning her tenure in dual-language classrooms in Los Angeles and abroad in China, Chile, Peru and Costa Rica. As a classroom teacher, Cathery visited over 300 student homes and integrated students’ lived experiences, knowledge and identities into the curriculum. Cathery’s research centers on critical mathematics education, humanizing practices, ethnic studies, and social justice teaching and learning. She is the co-author of the